For Internet traffic to reach its destination, routers along the way need to make informed decisions about the path the traffic should follow. This requires the routers to maintain routing information for numerous Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Additionally, through the allocation of additional IP addresses, the global routing table is growing, increasing the memory required to store the routing table. In order to maintain a high rate of traffic through a given router, access to the routing information and decisions about the next stop along the path need to occur rapidly, requiring relatively expensive high-speed memory for storing the routing table.
The use of the same reference symbols in different drawings indicates similar or identical items.